Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
... what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names — otherwise you would be selling nothing — like "Structured Analysis and Design", "Software Engineering", "Maturity Models", "Management Information Systems", "Integrated Project Support Environments" "Object Orientation" and "Business Process Re-engineering" (the latter three being known as IPSE, OO and BPR, respectively).
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for.
Chris Sacca
Most people find the concept of programming obvious, but the doing impossible.
Alan J. Perlis
Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
Alan Kay
The goal of computation is the emulation of our synthetic abilities, not the understanding of our analytic ones.
Alan J. Perlis
My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared.
P. J. Plauger
Within a computer natural language is unnatural.
Alan J. Perlis
Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
Eric Raymond
Anyone who has a wife and small kids knows that programming belongs to the easy things in life.
Anonymous
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
R. Buckminster Fuller